Oliver was truthful about everything except...

Reading Saints reminds me of a post I made years ago on my Letter VII blog.

The authors of Saints have publicly acknowledged they created a false narrative present to promote their agenda regarding a so-called "neutrality" position on Book of Mormon geography. But as you read the book, the authors rely quite a bit on Oliver Cowdery's accounts.

Readers of Saints see plenty of citations to Oliver's writings. But they also see his observations in Letter VII about the New York Cumorah are completely censored.

_____

Letter VII from Messenger and Advocate, July 1835

Those who reject Letter VII cite no reasons other than their preference for a different location for the Hill Cumorah.

It is interesting to take a look at Oliver Cowdery's participation in the Church to put Letter VII in context. When he wrote it, he was the Assistant President of the Church. He had been commanded by revelation to select materials to publish. All eight of Oliver's letters about history are accepted by Church historians as important insights into the early events of the Church. 

The only ones who object to any of Oliver's writings are the Mesoamerican advocates who reject just a few paragraphs out of one of the eight letters.

Oliver published Letter VII in July 1835. In February 1835, he, as one of the Three Witnesses, had selected the first members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He gave them their aspostolic charge. In April 1836, he, along with Joseph Smith, was visited in the Kirtland temple by Moses, Elias, Elijah, and the Savior Himself. Oliver and Joseph were given the keys of the gathering of Israel and the dispensation of the gospel of Abraham.

Mesoamerican advocates expect you to believe that Oliver Cowdery could faithfully record the entire Book of Mormon, most of the Book of Moses, and much of Church history. Oliver could faithfully edit and publish two Church newspapers, the Book of Commandments, and the original Doctrine and Covenants. He could accurately write the statement for the Three Witnesses. Of all the writing he did, you're supposed to believe he was faithful and accurate except for a few paragraphs in one letter, solely because those paragraphs contradict the opinions of the scholars.

Here is the chronology. Everything that is okay is marked green. The items the scholars object to is marked red.

	Date	Event
	1829 April	Transcribes Book of Mormon as Joseph dictates
	1829 May	Receives Aaronic Priesthood from John the Baptist, baptizes Joseph and is baptized by him
	1829 May	Receives Melchizedek Priesthood from Peter, James and John
	1829 June	Sees the plates and angel as one of the Three Witnesses
	1829 June	Completes Book of Mormon and makes a printer’s copy, supervises printing and publication
	1830 April	Helps organize the Church as a Second Elder and apostle, ordains Joseph Smith as First Elder
	1830 June	Transcribes Book of Moses 1:1 through 5:43
	1830 Oct.	Leaves on mission to the Lamanites
	1830 Nov.	Baptizes Sidney Rigdon
	1831 Jan.	Arrives in Jackson County, Mo.
	1831 Summer	Meets Joseph in Jackson County
	1831 Nov.	Takes revelations from Ohio to Missouri for publication
	1832	Helps Phelps with printing operation in Missouri
	1832 Apr.	Approves Book of Commandments
	1833 Nov.	Sets up printing press in Kirtland, reprints Evening and Morning Star
	1833 Dec.	Begins editing Evening and Morning Star
	1834 Feb.	Chosen as founding member of Kirtland Council
	1834 May-Aug.	Leader in Kirtland after Zions Camp left
	1834 Oct	Edits LDS Messenger and Advocate and Northern Times
	1834 Oct	Publishes Letter I about Church history, part of which is in the current Pearl of Great Price
	1834 Nov	Publishes Letter II about Church history
	1834 Dec	Publishes Letter III about Church history
	1834 Dec	Ordained by Joseph Smith as “Assistant President of the Church”
	1835	Publishes Letter IV about Church history
	1835 Feb	With David Whitmer and Martin Harris, selects first members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
	1835 Feb	Gives apostolic charge to the Twelve Apostles
	1835 Mar	Publishes Letter V about Church history
	1835 Apr	Publishes Letter VI about Church history
	1835 May	Resigns from Messenger and Advocate
	1835 July	Publishes Letter VII about Church history
	1835 Aug.	Gets Doctrine and Covenants approved for printing
	1835 Oct.	Publishes Letter VIII about Church history
	1836 Mar.	Resumes editing the Messenger and Advocate
	1836 Apr.	Visited in Kirtland temple by Moses, Elias, Elijah, and Christ, receives the keys of the gathering of Israel and dispensation of gospel of Abraham
	1836 July	Accompanies Joseph to Salem, MA
	1837 Feb.	Turns over printing company to Joseph and Sidney
	1838 July	“Excluded from fellowship” for accusations against Joseph
	1848 Nov.	Rebaptized into the Church
	1850 March	Dies in Richmond at home of David Whitmer

Selective standards toward historical sources

The power and influence of M2C is evident in the way that the book Saints features a variety of selective standards toward the historical accounts.

The most egregious, of course, is authors' deliberate violation of their own claim that they wanted to portray characters in their narrative present, meaning as those characters saw themselves at the time. This is an ideal way to write history; it puts readers into the actual world of the people they are reading about.

However, because of their desire to promote a modern narrative about Book of Mormon geography, the authors created a false narrative present by portraying figures in Church history as unaware of the Hill Cumorah in New York.

To create this false narrative present, the authors used a variety of selective standards. Let's look at some.

_____

The authors claimed that Joseph Smith never referred to the "hill in New York" where he got the plates as the hill Cumorah.

However, they know that Lucy Mack Smith gave us a direct quotation of Joseph referring to the hill as Cumorah in 1827 before he even got the plates. The editors avoid this evidence by editing around it, as I showed in another post.

They also know that in D&C 128:20, Joseph specifically referred to Cumorah. How did they get around this evidence that contradicts their narrative present? Simply by quoting portions of D&C 128 from before and after verse 20 (see p. 477).

The authors also know that Joseph Smith helped Oliver write the eight historical letters that they cited many times, but they don't inform readers that Joseph had the letters copied into his personal history, or that he approved the republication of these letters multiple times.
_____

They also apply a selective standard to the evidence they cite throughout the book.

Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that the editors were correct; i.e., let's pretend Joseph never referred to Cumorah. Is that a justification for censoring the term?

The editors don't apply that standard with regard to other topics. Throughout the book, they write about what Joseph thought, felt, wanted, etc., all based on their inferences.

On page 434, they acknowledge that "Joseph himself left no record of his own views on plural marriage or his struggle to obey the commandment. Emma too disclosed nothing about how early she learned of the practice or what impact it had on her marriage. The writings of others close to them, however, make clear that it was a source of anguish for both of them."

This lack of an actual record is no obstacle because this is a topic the authors of Saints wanted to discuss. The book goes on to make speculative statements such as this: "Yet Joseph felt an urgency to teach it to the Saints, despite the risks and his own reservations."

Making reasonable inferences is fine, but notice the selective standard. The authors censor Cumorah because they claim Joseph "left no record of his own views" on Cumorah, but they also censor "the writings of others close to them" that "make clear that" Joseph and his associates all believed Cumorah was in New York.

IOW, on the topic of plural marriage, the authors of Saints speculate at length about what Joseph thought, based on the writings of others. But on the topic of Cumorah, not only do they censor what Joseph actually said and wrote, but they censor the writings of others that corroborated Joseph's own words.
_____

Another example is the treatment of Parley P. Pratt's autobiography and its sources. When Pratt wrote something that fit the narrative the authors wanted, they freely quoted from his writings.

For example, on pages 367-8, they related Joseph Smith's rebuke of the prison guards in Richmond, Missouri, in 1838. They provide a direct quotation of what Joseph said, taken from Pratt's Autobiography (which in turn was based on a letter Pratt wrote in 1853).

However, Matt Grow, one of the historians who defended the censorship of Cumorah in Saints, provided a different interpretation of this quotation in another book. Here's an explanation from an article about the topic.

Givens and Grow provide the following assessment of the narrative: “Written years after Smith’s death, the account describes a hero of inspiring proportions; if Pratt did not express such veneration during Smith’s lifetime, distance and the aura of martyrdom made it easier for Pratt, as his disciple, to describe such a moment of mythic splendor. With his tendency toward Victorian grandiloquence, his Manichean worldview, and the sense of poetic license, Pratt perhaps embellished the scene. . . . However, there is no reason to doubt the essentials of the account.” Givens and Grow, Parley P. Pratt, 144. The fact that Pratt did not even mention the rebuking incident in his History of the Late Persecutions (most of which he wrote between December 1838 to mid-March 1839), supports Givens and Grows conclusion that over time, the incident became even more impressive in his mind.

http://mormonhistoricsites.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/%E2%80%9CSilence-Ye-Fiends-of-the-Infernal-Pit%E2%80%9D-Joseph-Smith%E2%80%99s-Incarceration-in-Richmond-Missouri-November-1838.pdf
_____

I bring this up to show how, when it fits the desired narrative, the authors of Saints had no problem providing direct quotations, even when they knew the quotations were first recorded 15 years after the event, were never mentioned earlier, and were probably embellished on top of that.

But when a quotation from the same source contradicts the desired narrative, it becomes unreliable and subject to censorship.

The New York Cumorah contradicts the modern M2C narrative, so the authors of Saints censor it, even though Parley P. Pratt's Autobiography included the following quotation.

"This Book, which contained these things, was hid in the earth by Moroni, in a hill called by him, Cumorah, which hill is now in the State of New York, near the village of Palmyra, in Ontario county." p. 57.

The authors of Saints also dismissed Lucy Mack Smith's quotation of Joseph Smith referring to Cumorah in 1827, apparently because she didn't record it until 1845, although she related it verbally prior to that. M2C advocates say Lucy's memory was unreliable on this one point (the New York Cumorah), but they cite her account throughout Saints and other accounts of Church history.
_____